Bureaucrats are easy scapegoats for the ills that come with governments supplying thousands services. Sure they make some ridiculous and identifiable errors. Who in their life hasn't?
But the overall mess in the provision of large-scale services just isn't their fault. The NDIS and aged care are just examples.
Our demand for nationwide services generates the need for enormous blackhole bureaucracies.
Activity is generated but who is answerable to whom and for what is unclear. That's the nature of bureaucracies. Everywhere. We become slaves to process rather than outcomes.
If our faith in bureaucracies isn't stupid enough, we add to that stupidity. We carry the incredibly naive view that if something is written on paper it probably has some truth to it. There was a time that was a reasonable proposition, but no more. AI has certainly put an end to that.
If the inertia of a bureaucracy and the fallibility of the written word isn't enough we further restrict our bureaucrats because we're too weak to take the tough route with cheats and crooks.
Sometimes, we are really stupid. Imagine saying to bureaucrats in Canberra: "Here's quite a few billion dollars. Please organise disability services for thousands of people spread out around Australia with a wide variety of needs, make sure we don't pay too much and make sure each service is actually delivered". Stupid. We do the same in so many areas.
How on earth was that ever going to work? And when, not surprisingly, it doesn't work, we all too often blame the bureaucrats. Fancy being blamed for not being able to do what was impossible in the first place.
How can bureaucrats in Canberra be all-knowing about the services that are required and possible to deliver in so many different circumstances around Australia?
Equally, perhaps more importantly, how could they know if the services have actually been delivered?
Of course, we can require providers to fill in forms and tick boxes. Imagine the tsunami of forms floating around the bureaucracy. How on earth can they all be adequately reviewed in the first place? Let alone checked for veracity. So how do we really know if the service was provided? When, tragically, we find it hasn't been provided or provided adequately there's no doubt a process for pursuing the provider. That's where we make a mistake.
Gold stars to the federal police for the work they've been doing in pursuing sleazy, rip-off providers. These creeps abound in the NDIS and no doubt in all areas of service provision. We don't give the cops enough credit for the fabulous work they do.
But perhaps we are going about it the wrong way. We are relying on process because that's what bureaucracies can manage. What if we no longer bothered with all that paperwork?
Decades ago on a visit to Israel, the quality control mechanism for a kibbutz selling fruit and vegetables was very simple. They set certain standards for the size and quality of the fruit that members could deliver. Only random checks were done. If it turned out that you delivered produce below standard, there was a simple consequence. You were banned from delivering produce for quite an extensive period.
It was treated not like we treat accusations in court of misbehaviour, where, generally, to be convicted the crown must show that you intended to do the wrong thing.(The fancy expression is you had to have mens rea).
Rather, it was treated like that which we call a strict liability offence. That is, you did it and whether you intended to or not is irrelevant. You get a conviction.
If we did this with service providers, we might find that spot checks followed by being cut off as a provider for failure to deliver would make providers much more interested in being sure that the services were in fact delivered.
To make this clearer, think of it this way. If the guy delivering strawberries to the kibbutz for sale had to hand in a form certifying that the strawberries met the standards would that ensure that he always delivered strawberries in accordance with those standards? No. It would just ensure that he put in a form saying that's what he'd done.
Paper and signatures mean little to crooks.
Well outside of service provision and the associated crookery, the obsession with paper, or the written word, as somehow having law-enforcement-type qualities still exists.
Nearly half a century ago, in the Old Parliament House, there were plastic security pass holders in which one inserted one's pass with a photo ID.
Rumour has it that Bill Hayden's chief of staff replaced his photo with one of his Alsatian dog. Nobody noticed, because nobody looked.
Some HR departments require personnel to write up their self-development goals for the oncoming year. After all, HR, having been established, must show an interest in staff wellbeing.
Once a bureaucracy is created, it gives itself work to justify the need for its existence. How many of these are done in universities around Australia?
HR get to demonstrate an interest in the wellbeing of staff by requiring them to express their goals for the oncoming year. The expectation may be from staff that someone will actually look at this form and perhaps have a discussion about how those goals can be achieved.
However, I know someone who for four years, apart from the front cover, put in a blank form. Nobody noticed. Why? Because it's ludicrous to imagine that HR in a university can possibly do that for each staff member.
Requiring the form to be filled in at least gives the impression that somebody cares. But that's all it does. How many HR professionals then consult with a person who wrote up their goals? Not many. Somehow we expect the mere writing down of something to give an import or effectiveness to the written words.
We ask people to prepare reports with the idea that the simple preparation of thoughts on paper will somehow lead to a better exposition of what has been happening. The bottom line is that nobody is, in fact, looking at this tsunami of paperwork.
Even when they do look, the veracity of what one reads is questionable. My time in immigration taught me that. Words on paper have no inherent quality unless someone reads them, understands them, verifies them and actions them.
On the other hand, simply cutting someone off from the money trail because they haven't delivered would have a stark and brutal consequence. People would start to deliver on their commitments.
There is a broader problem. We have become obsessed with being fair to the defalcator at the expense of the person who has in fact been wronged. The perpetrator has become to many of us, the victim. The real victim however is all too often the person in desperate need of services and on whose behalf you and I are happy to shell out big bucks. But we want them to get the benefit.
A novel approach might be to go to the real victim. Where they are capable, let them decide what services they need and by whom they will be delivered. Put the money (read power) effectively, if not actually, in the victim's hands. Yes, there will be plenty of cases where this is not possible. But where it is, what a difference that would make. Listen to and give power to the real victim.
